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China Proposes Rival Video Format
Richard Finney writes "Yahoo News is reporting that
the Chinese government is supporting an effort to develop a homegrown standard, called 'AVS,' for compressing digital audio and video in order to avoid paying royalties
on proprietary compression schemes.
The AVS groups website is online but in Chinese."
In case anybody else hasn't noticed, China is turning out to be -- in fact, already is, simply by its sheer size -- the world's largest booster of open source and royalty-free hardware and software in the world. Open Source and Free Software movements couldn't ask for a more powerful force to have on their side, and they are consistently expanding and improving what they offer -- first Red Flag Linux, then the dragon chip, and now this. Woo!
Why not just use ogg video?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The Chinese seem determined to avoid patent issues by developing their own chips, and now their own video formats.
The intellectual property laws that were supposed to guarantee our technology a dominant position may, in practice, be shutting U.S. companies out of future marketplaces, as tech customers seek a way around excessive royalties and restrictions.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Slashdot : Today's SCO news - Darl McBride wakes up, brushes teeth, SCOX down 10 cents.
China : So? We've got RedFlag Linux, we don't bother about US Copyright laws.
Slashdot: Intel settles with Via, latter not to make pin-compatible CPUs after 3 years... blah,blah,blah..
China: Here's the Dragon CPU. Forget Intel, forget Via.
Slashdot: CDMA and GSM are the top technologies for mobile phones.
China: We've developed SCDMA totally in-house. We don't pay royalties for that.
And now...
Slashdot: GIF is out of patent. Some image formats still remain in copyright and patents mess.
China: Here's our video format.
Slashdot: XBox can be hacked to run Linux.
China: Dragon CPU runs Midori Linux. We don't need any damn XBoxes..
And so on.. Slashdotters makes noise, China makes progress.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Communism may not be a good fit with physical goods and commodities and stuff like that, but I think China is setting a good example with intangible, non-rivalrous goods (IP). Once they design a chip, or a video compression scheme, no one can exhaust its usefulness. This is a good thing.
Now don't think I'm going so far out there. We have similar ideas here, and we at least pretend to practice them. That's the idea behind University research and stuff like that (at least before universities had the right to own the products of their research).
Here in America, I think we need more research done for the public benefit, paid with public money. There are so many intricacies to the vision I have, and I can anticipate many objections, but I'm not going to write a whole long post here. I'm just making a positive suggestion here.
According to China Population Information and Research (CPIRC), the total population in Mainland China is 1,289,646,742.
No, it won't. Mainland China is now separated into its own region (region 6, region 3 is used in Hong Kong, South Korea, and some other Southeast Asian countries). Anyone who is making bootleg video isn't going to play by the rules; they want to maximize the number of people they can sell to. So if you go on ebay to buy those bootleg copies of Star Wars IV - VI you won't find that they say "Region 6. Only playable in China!" It'll be the same way with this AVS format. It also assumes this technology would replace DVDs in China, which seems a bit far-stretched at this point.
Well, according to the RIAA the population in China is the equivalent of 900 million people, since the chinese are a bit shorter.
A common pool of research and market for close to 2 billion peoples, all sharing in some way a low tech - low money environment...
Open Source is the only way to go if they want to avoid royalties...
when you have one billion inhabitant, anything can become a huge problem...
I remember my economy eacher telling us why coffee was badly seen as a morning drink in china. Because if only 1/2 of your population takes one cup coffee in the day, it amounts to 50 tons a day in purely imports...
And, also, if their standard is proposed as is in all future media players (say, how many DVD players are not made in China ?) this standard could become the worlds standards...
And the whole world will have to pay royalties to China...
Ahhhn Anticipation ! 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
...you cheer on a country with such a horrid human rights record simply because its software ideals appear to align with your own.
Xiph.org isn't only developing Ogg Vorbis, but also Ogg Theora. It's still in alpha stages though. The technology used in Theora is based on the vp3 codec which is covered by patents, but Xiph.org has negotiated an "irrevocable free license to the vp3 codec for any purpose imaginable on behalf of the public".
Xiph.org is also developing the experimental wavelet-based "Tarkin" codec. As I understand it, it's more written from "scratch", much like Ogg Vorbis, but is even further ahead in the future than Ogg Theora, which they are focusing on right now.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I wonder if this would cut down on media piracy worldwide. Since Videos/DVDs on the black market in China would be in AVS Format, no other country could play them.
Who the heck do you think manufactures all the players? Chinese companies. They'll throw in AVS support for nothing with their players (no point in setting up 2 production lines when 1 will do), just like they threw in support for VCD and SVCD. And then the players will get shipped to every country in the world.
In fact, this is a real shot in the arm for piracy, as they can rip the video from DVDs, repackage it in non-region encoded AVS format. Then they fire it around the wibbly-wobbly web in handy, ready-to-burn form and their little pirate buddies with an AVS-compliant player go "Woohoo! No more swapping SVCD discs!"
But, for exactly the same reasons, it'll also be a boost for amateur and small media production companies as they won't have to pay Philips and Sony a big wad of their earnings to get their media distributed worldwide.
A better question would be: given China's intransigence when it comes to upholding international intellectual property agreements, should we rip off this format, use it for publishing everything, make tools to create and edit AVS files willy-nilly, burn AVS discs, blah, blah, blah..., and not pay them one red cent for it?
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
I admire their technical prowess, but they're not doing it with the good of humanity in mind. It's all about proving that they're not trapped in luohouzhuyi, literally "fall-behind-ism." They've failed as a communist party, so now the only thing keeping them in power is trying to prove that they're making China strong enough to resist foreign interference. That's what this project feels like to me.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
This is why we need to support Open-Source lobbying efforts. Right now, sending a native Chinese lobbyist to push China to adopt the work of the Ogg team as their official standards would be a great coup for the Open Source movement.
China never really has gotten over that "we are the center of the earth" mentality have they?
In my experience the USA has the same problem at times.
As opposed to American publishers who infuriated Charles Dickens by publishing his books without acknowledging his copyright.
And now of course we have American publishers who want to extend copyright in perpetuity to stop people having fair use of characters in the likes of Rudyard Kipling's books.
... glass houses, stones, etc...
/.r who pointed out that whilst China's gov is slowly getting better, ours is quite quickly getting worse.
Let's just say that your local media is more likely to tell you that another country is Bad(tm) then tell you about the stuff your own country is up to.
I'm not condoning any form of human rights abuse, I'd really like to live in a nice, happy, peaceful world, but let's face it; the west is not exactly utopia either. I saw a post around here the other day from a chinese
Warning: May contain nuts
You can buy a VCD player here in Beijing for $25 USD, and a regionless (*cough*) DVD/MP3/VCD combo for under $50. Since the average annual income is about $3000 USD, that's equivalent to someone making $24,000/year buying a $200 machine. Factor in VCD rentals at $0.20/day and DVD/VCDs on sale for between $1 and $1.50... its easy to see why owning this stuff is becoming pretty common.
Total population figure is irrelevant though. Even if people in rural Fujian aren't making enough money to buy a lot of DVDs, there are 16 million people in Beijing and several million more in the Yantze river delta. And when the population of just a few Chinese cities starts to rival countries like Germany... it makes a huge difference for international standards competition.